More quotes from "The First Idea"
(still out of context, of course !!!)
The authors are comparing the standard model, where most of the emotions are subconscious and according to some (like the neuroscientist LeDoux) are not expressable in language. The rational level is then the conscious level over top of this subconscious, and is fed by it, affected by it. Importantly ... there is a division between the conscious and conscious that equates to a division between the rational and the emotional.
"We are proposing, however, that emotions serve to integrate the different processing areas of the mind, such as attention and sequencing, visual-spatial thinking, sensory processing, and language."
"The ability to know an emotion - to study one's own perception of it - is proportional to the degree to which it is tamed and transformed into an interactive and representational form."
"The key to the conscious awareness of emotions is, therefore, the human ability to tame the emotion through emotional signalling [between individuals, especially infant and caregiver] and make it into a signal."
"Transforming catastrophic emotions into signals enables a child to integratge subsymbolic [subconscious] and symbolic [conscious] systems."
"As emotions become part of interactive patterns, the child learns to perceive the pattern. She doesn't simply experience her heart beating or a desire to run away; she experiences fear, and then soothing [from the caregiver], and eventually mastery. These emotional patterns include expectations and the anticipation of feelings. For example, a toddler learns that her joy leads to happiness in her parents. She may also learn that her anger leads to parental disapproval or disquiet. These patterns now define the emotion. THE EMOTION NO LONGER EXISTS AS AN ISOLATED ENTITY and, since affective interactions begin very early in life, perhaps it never really did"
[emphasis mine]
"The emotional recognition that one's actions can have an impact on someone else is the foundation for sequencing, that is, the ability to carry out many steps in a row where each one is related to a previous one."
- Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker
I include that last quote as Natalie had asked me in a comment to say more about what the authors mean by sequencing. As per this quote, it is not the same thing as meant by basic Gestalt, which is more, i take it, to be the sequencing of numbers, especially counting, early in the infants life and expanded upon later.
(Infants can tell the number of discrete objects [at least up to three] pretty much from birth. ["Subitizing" - Many other animals, "down to" the birds, also can do this.] By age 15 months babies are known to have a concept of "order" for numbers, say, that 3 is greater than 2. Ddevelopmental Cog Sci types are still much split over how early the concept of number order exists in the infant's mind.)
I can't help but think of Dostoevski's underground man when psychologists talk about taming emotions for utility purposes.
What would Nietzsche think?
The authors are comparing the standard model, where most of the emotions are subconscious and according to some (like the neuroscientist LeDoux) are not expressable in language. The rational level is then the conscious level over top of this subconscious, and is fed by it, affected by it. Importantly ... there is a division between the conscious and conscious that equates to a division between the rational and the emotional.
"We are proposing, however, that emotions serve to integrate the different processing areas of the mind, such as attention and sequencing, visual-spatial thinking, sensory processing, and language."
"The ability to know an emotion - to study one's own perception of it - is proportional to the degree to which it is tamed and transformed into an interactive and representational form."
"The key to the conscious awareness of emotions is, therefore, the human ability to tame the emotion through emotional signalling [between individuals, especially infant and caregiver] and make it into a signal."
"Transforming catastrophic emotions into signals enables a child to integratge subsymbolic [subconscious] and symbolic [conscious] systems."
"As emotions become part of interactive patterns, the child learns to perceive the pattern. She doesn't simply experience her heart beating or a desire to run away; she experiences fear, and then soothing [from the caregiver], and eventually mastery. These emotional patterns include expectations and the anticipation of feelings. For example, a toddler learns that her joy leads to happiness in her parents. She may also learn that her anger leads to parental disapproval or disquiet. These patterns now define the emotion. THE EMOTION NO LONGER EXISTS AS AN ISOLATED ENTITY and, since affective interactions begin very early in life, perhaps it never really did"
[emphasis mine]
"The emotional recognition that one's actions can have an impact on someone else is the foundation for sequencing, that is, the ability to carry out many steps in a row where each one is related to a previous one."
- Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker
I include that last quote as Natalie had asked me in a comment to say more about what the authors mean by sequencing. As per this quote, it is not the same thing as meant by basic Gestalt, which is more, i take it, to be the sequencing of numbers, especially counting, early in the infants life and expanded upon later.
(Infants can tell the number of discrete objects [at least up to three] pretty much from birth. ["Subitizing" - Many other animals, "down to" the birds, also can do this.] By age 15 months babies are known to have a concept of "order" for numbers, say, that 3 is greater than 2. Ddevelopmental Cog Sci types are still much split over how early the concept of number order exists in the infant's mind.)
I can't help but think of Dostoevski's underground man when psychologists talk about taming emotions for utility purposes.
What would Nietzsche think?
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 6:17 PM
1 Comments:
If emotions are pre-symbolic, to know an emotion (which necessitates the symbolic) is to impose a symbol (and I would argue, a Gestalt) over a heterogeneous field of affect. One does not really know the emotion in its non-symbolic state, but inevitably interprets (transforms it) it through the symbolic.
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